Bounding Institutional Authority in Comparative Politics and International Relations

The article of record as published may be located at http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/1015015arThis paper seeks to draw attention to a neglected but essential element of institutions: their boundaries.1 Boundaries permit actors to organize the world around them into categories and groups and to establish arenas of authority or jurisdiction. Scholars too often assume that boundaries between groups are firm and clear, and assume that these distinctions form the basis for social hierarchies and divisions of labor. However, the nature of boundaries is no less important to institutional operation and social organization than is the fact of their existence. As the first step in a larger research program, we set out to elaborate here not only the importance that the existence of boundaries has in creating and regulating social organization, but also the political significance that the varying nature of boundaries has. We draw on our own work from very different sub-disciplines of political science to highlight what boundaries do and how they vary, as well as to raise a set of theoretical questions to guide further investigation

The Cold Peace: Russo-Western Relations as a Mimetic Cold War

In 1989–1991 the geo-ideological contestation between two blocs was swept away, together with the ideology of civil war and its concomitant Cold War played out on the larger stage. Paradoxically, while the domestic sources of Cold War confrontation have been transcended, its external manifestations remain in the form of a ‘legacy’ geopolitical contest between the dominant hegemonic power (the United States) and a number of potential rising great powers, of which Russia is one. The post-revolutionary era is thus one of a ‘cold peace’. A cold peace is a mimetic cold war. In other words, while a cold war accepts the logic of conflict in the international system and between certain protagonists in particular, a cold peace reproduces the behavioural patterns of a cold war but suppresses acceptance of the logic of behaviour. A cold peace is accompanied by a singular stress on notions of victimhood for some and undigested and bitter victory for others. The perceived victim status of one set of actors provides the seedbed for renewed conflict, while the ‘victory’ of the others cannot be consolidated in some sort of relatively unchallenged post-conflict order. The ‘universalism’ of the victors is now challenged by Russia's neo-revisionist policy, including not so much the defence of Westphalian notions of sovereignty but the espousal of an international system with room for multiple systems (the Schmittean pluriverse)

Historical aspirations and the domestic politics of Russia's pursuit of international status

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.postcomstud.2014.02.0020967-067X/What determined Russia's national interests and grand strategy in the first decade after the Cold War? This article uses aspirational constructivism, which combines social psychology with constructivism, to answer this question. Central to aspirational constructivism are the roles that the past self and in-groups, and their perceived effectiveness play in the selection of a national identity and the definition of national interests. This article explains why Russian political elites settled on a statist national identity that focused on retaining Russia's historical status as a Western great power and hegemon in the former Soviet Union and in engaging the country in bounded status competition with the United States

Constructivism’s Micro-Foundations: aspirations, social identity theory and Russia's national interests (DRAFT)

Paper prepared for delivery at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, Aug. 28- Sept. 1, 2013. DRAFT. Please do not cite without author’s permission.This paper employs an aspirational constructivist approach that brings together social psychology and constructivism to provide causal microfoundations for the identities and status- seeking behavior of rising and declining power. It explains how the psychological need for collective self-esteem and value rationality, and construction of multiple ingroups and outgroups, shape its national identity, its status aspirations and international behavior. It applies this approach to post-Soviet Russia, where the elite converged around a status-driven national self-image that located Russia in the group of global great powers and the West. Contrary to oft-repeated warnings of a new Cold War, however, this identity generated diffuse national interests in social, rather than material, competition for global status, primarily with the United States

Constructivism’s micro-foundations: aspirations, social identity theory, and Russia's national interests (DRAFT)

Draft. Please do not cite without author’s permission.Russia's national interests have not been defined on the basis of conventional cost-benefit assessments, perceptions of material threat, or the identities projected onto Russia by other countries. Aspirations to regain the international great power status that Russians believe their country enjoyed during the tsarist and Soviet past were critical to the creation of its present national identity and national security interests. This paper asks how Russian elites came to have these national interests in social competition for great power status. In trying to explain how national interests are created, I present a novel aspirational constructivist approach that draws heavily on social psychology to answer three fundamental questions: What are the sources of national identity? Why do multiple identities come into contention? How does one of these candidate national identities come to dominate the others and become "social fact," acting as "the" national identity that defines a country's core national interests? In developing the answers, we gain a better understanding of how foreign “others” enter into the definition of Russia’s national identity and the formation of its interests

The fight against terrorist financing

According to a well-informed former participant, the effort to combat terrorists' access to financial resources has been "the most successful part" of the global community's counterterrorism endeavor since the al Qaeda 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States. Genuine success, however, hinges on U.S. ability to successfully frame terrorist financing as a collective action problem, both internally, to overcome interagency rivalries, and internationally, to overcome the benefits of free-riding behavior. This requires reframing the nascent pre-September 11 international anti-money-laundering regime as a counter-terrorist-financing regime as well as recasting the collective good of an open financial system as requiring collective management of its negative security externalities

Bounding the Sovereign: Humanitarianism and the Decline of Sovereign Immunity

Prepared for delivery at the 2007 Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, February 28-March 3, 2007State sovereignty is at root a set of rules about institutional boundaries that divide political and territorial space. Institutional boundaries permit actors to organize the world around them into categories and groups and to establish arenas of authority or jurisdiction. In this paper, I suggest that the boundaries of external and internal sovereignty have become more permeable over the course of the past 150 years as a result of the blurring of the boundaries of international humanitarian and human rights law. The changes in institutional boundaries demarcating human rights and humanitarian law have reconfigured state authority to organize domestic and interstate affairs. I argue that these changes have made the boundary of state sovereignty more permeable in two ways. First, they have reduced the legitimate scope of all state's internal sovereignty. On the one hand, states appear to be increasingly subjecting themselves to a reduced sphere of exclusive sovereign authority and to greater international accountability. On the other, states have expanded their claims to domestically adjudicate cases that have traditionally been beyond the boundary of sovereign immunity. Second, the change in boundaries of international humanitarian and human rights law has given individual human beings the legal authority to confront states. As a result, individuals have much greater ability to access national and international courts to seek redress for acts committed by state officials. This shift allows new actors to take on rights and responsibility once the sole domain of states, and subsequently to limit the authority of states domestically as well as globally. These changes and their consequences are explored through historical analyses of the humanitarian and human rights regimes and the recent political struggles over the Pinochet case and the International Criminal Court

Russia and the Liberal World Order

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0892679418000096While Russian leaders are clearly dissatisfied with the United States and the European Union, they are not inherently opposed to a liberal world order. The question of Russia's desire to change a liberal international order hangs on the type of liberalism embedded in that order. Despite some calls from within for it to create a new, post-liberal order premised on conservative nationalism and geopolitics, Russia is unlikely to fare well in such a world

Constructivism’s Micro-Foundations: Aspirations, Social Identity Theory, and Russia’s National Interests / American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA, August 30 - September 2, 2012

SSRN-id2106681Russia's national interests have not been defined on the basis of conventional cost-benefit assessments, perceptions of material threat, or the identities projected onto Russia by other countries. Aspirations to regain the international great power status that Russians believe their country enjoyed during the tsarist and Soviet past were critical to the creation of its present national identity and national security interests. This paper asks how Russian elites came to have these national interests in social competition for great power status. In trying to explain how national interests are created, I present a novel aspirational constructivist approach that draws heavily on social psychology to answer three fundamental questions: What are the sources of national identity? Why do multiple identities come into contention? How does one of these candidate national identities come to dominate the others and become "social fact," acting as "the" national identity that defines a country's core national interests? In developing the answers, we gain a better understanding of how foreign “others” enter into the definition of Russia’s national identity and the formation of its interests

Perspectives on Global and Regional Security and Implications of Nuclear and Space Technologies: U.S.-Brazil Strategic Dialogue, Phase II Report

PASCC, Project on Advanced Systems and Concepts for Countering Weapons of Mass DestructionThis report is approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.In August 2014, the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center on Contemporary Conflict hosted an off-the-record dialogue between U.S. and Brazilian officials and experts on the role of strategic technologies in each country’s perceptions of global and regional security. Following from the 2012 PASCC-sponsored U.S.-Brazil dialogue, this meeting expanded the scope of discussion beyond nuclear weapons and disarmament to examine factors affecting mutual perceptions of nuclear, space, and missile technologies. The dialogue aimed to increase mutual understanding of: 1) the ways these advanced technologies are perceived, developed and managed in the United States and Brazil; 2) the regional and global security threats that arise from these capabilities; and 3) the means for cooperation on managing the negative implications of these technologies, both at the inter-governmental and civil-society level. The meeting brought together active and former high-level defense officials with academic experts to address these issues. The meeting produced an exceptionally rich, open, friendly and frank discussion that succeeded in increasing understanding of each side’s strategic concerns and identified some practical steps for bilateral cooperation.U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, Center on Contemporary Conflict , Project on Advanced Systems and Concepts for Countering WM